Top CDN Services for a Blazingly Fast WordPress Site

Top CDN Services for a Blazingly Fast WordPress Site

If you’re serious about speeding up your site and you’ve optimized the bejesus out of it (smushed images, minified CSS and JavaScript, set up a caching plugin…), it’s time to think about signing up to a content delivery network, or CDN.

A CDN will drastically reduce server lag by storing static resources on a network of fast loading servers.

Choosing a CDN can be tricky since there are many options available. Finding the right one depends entirely on your needs and the popularity of your site.

In this post we’ll look at some of the more popular CDNs available for websites, big and small. I’ve deliberately excluded some CDN companies, such as Akamai and Level 3, which are better suited to large-scale enterprise sites.

What is a CDN and Why Use One?

A CDN is a network of servers, usually located at various sites around the world, which cache the static content of a site, such as image, CSS and JavaScript files.

The CDN provider copies your site’s static content to its servers, so when someone lands on your site, the static content is delivered from the server closest to them.

For a visual look at how this works, check out this handy graphic from GTmetrix:

Serving up content to a user, with and without a CDN.

MaxCDN

Free Trial: If you use over 15TB a month you qualify for a free MaxCDN trial. This includes everything that comes with a MaxCDN enterprise account, including unlimited bandwidth, negotiable trial length, all features enabled, and one-on-one setup call.

Pricing: Basic Start Plan comes with 100BG bandwidth for two websites for $9 a month.

MaxCDN is a popular and well-known CDN that powers the likes of The Next Web, The Washington Times and WP Engine.

If you use W3 Total Cache, setting up MaxCDN is a piece of cake. Simply go to the plugin’s setting, enable the CDN function, select MaxCDN, and then go to the CDN tab and enter your CNAMEs and API credentials. MaxCDN will then serve up whatever you specify, including images, media, and JavaScript and CSS files.

An elegant control panel displays a CDN usage summary for your website, and you can also access information such as hourly breakdown, edge locations users, and your top 50 files.

The service has servers all over the world, including the US, UK, China and Australia, with more edge locations planned. In addition, MaxCDN has 53 peering partners in North America and Europe to minimize hopes between ISPs.

CloudFlare

Pricing: Plans start at $20 per month for your first website and $5 per month for each subsequent website.

CloudFlare is another well-known CDN service. Unlike many CDNs, CloudFlare doesn’t charge for bandwidth usage on the basis that if your site suddenly gets popular or suffers an attack, you shouldn’t have to dread your bandwidth bill.

According to CloudFlare, on average a website using the CDN will load twice as fast, use 60 per cent less bandwidth, have 65 per cent fewer requests, and is more secure.

CloudFlare operates out of 28 data centers around the world and uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to the nearest data center.

The service uses more than 200 global edge locations around the world so your users get content fact and from servers within their region. Cloud Files maintains three copies of each files, ensuring files are delivers fast and reliably.

Rackspace’s partnership with Akamai is significant. The CDN is one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms, responsive for serving between 15 and 30 per cent of all web traffic. Some of the company’s customers have include Facebook and Twitter.

CacheFly

CacheFly promises to deliver your static files (images, video, audio, CSS etc) at up to 10 times faster than other solutions. The company even guarantees 100 per cent network availability or your money back.

Microsoft, Adobe and Bank of America are just some of CacheFly’s clients.

While CacheFly has a solid reputation – and has clients who have stuck around since they started in 2002 – the only downside is that it’s one of the most expensive CDN options.

WPPronto

Pricing: A Small plan starts at $30 a month and includes two WordPress site, 10GB SSD storage and 100GB bandwidth.

WPPronto makes it onto this list because it started out as a CDN (the company launched in 2009 at WPCDN) and has since pivoted to focus on web hosting.

The company offers a CDN service using CloudFlare. It also focuses on security, offering multiple layers of protection (including DDoS attached production), SSL for everyone, and support Clef two-factor authentication.

Pricing: Amazon S3 storage starts at 3 cents per gigabyte for standard storage. Amazon CloudFront pricing starts at 12 cents per month for the first 10 terabytes, with separate pricing for regions outside the US.

Amazon offers a couple of services I’ll mention here. Amazon S3 is a budget-friendly storage solution designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure and fast infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites.

While Amazon AWS has a reputation for reliability, it’s good to keep in mind that CloudFront is aimed at developers and not inexperienced users.

On average, websites using Incapsula’s CDN are 50% faster and consume 40%-70% less bandwidth, according to the company’s website.

The service provides a great monitoring dashboard so you can check the effect of caching on your website’s performance.

There’s also an API for companies that want to control caching policies and change things like caching modes, create custom caching rules, purge the cache, purge a specific cache, or configure content optimization settings.

Photon by Jetpack

Free Trial: Free product.

Pricing: Free product.

Photon isn’t a CDN, but it makes this list because it provides a WordPress-only image caching service through the Jetpack plugin. This means less load on your hosting server and faster images for your visitors.

There are a few limitations with this service. There are no cache invalidations, so currently the images are cached “forever” and if you want to refresh an image you will need to change the name of the image. Also, Photon only caches GIF, PNG and JPG files.

Bandwidth Needs

If your site gets little traffic, it might not be worth signing up for a premium CDN. A free service, such as Photon by Jetpack or Cloudflare’s free service will suffice. Alternatively, you may want to consider upgrading your hosting.

When you are delivering about 500GB per month of traffic it makes sense to offload those hits to a CDN.

If you provide videos, podcasts, music, large images, and software downloads, a CDN will ensure your visitors are able to access your media quickly.

Network Performance

Where are your users located? How many servers do you expect a CDN to have, and where?

If the majority of visitors to your site are based in the US, it makes sense to go with a CDN with servers spread across that region. However, if you have a spread of visitors from across the US, Europe and Asia, it would be better for your content to be available on servers in those regions.

It’s also important to note whether a CDN offers a push or pull service. A push CDN works very much like a secondary server. The user uploads content directly to the CDN (automatically or manually) and links to it. With a pull CDN, the site owner leaves the content on their server and and rewrites their URLs to point to the CDN. When asked for a specific file, the CDN will first go to the the original server, pull the file and serve it. The CDN then caches that file until it expires.

CloudFlare operates out of 28 data centers around the world.

Technology

Do you require streaming downloads, such as video, audio or software downloads? Do you run a gaming website?

Some CDNs, like CDN77, offer speciality services that support streaming.

Support

It’s easy to check what kind of support is on hand, whether it be live chat or email support. Some CDNs offer technical assistance over the phone.

It’s also worth noting whether a CDN is available 24/7, and having a look through their service level agreement.

Most CDNs offer a 100 per cent SLA, but you don’t want to have to chase down credits if your CDN doesn’t meet it SLA.

Cost

How much are you willing to spend? Will you be compensated for network outages?

There are huge differences in cost from one CDN to the next, and plans differ from pay-as-you-go to monthly accounts with set features.

The price you pay will depend on the CDN plan that best meets your needs and how much traffic lands on your site.

Many CDNs offer free trial periods so if you’re interested in trying out a CDN you’ve got nothing to lose.

Best CDN for Multisite?

The jury’s still out on this.

While many services support WordPress, the lines blur when it comes to Multisite.

Services like MaxCDN, CloudFlare and Rackspace can be integrated with WordPress using W3 Total Cache, but the caching plugin still doesn’t fully support Multisite (you can use it on sub-sites and the main site, but not an entire network).

If you’ve used a CDN successfully with your Multisite network, I’d be interested to read about your experience in the comments below.

Summing Up

Where once websites were delivered from a single server, CDNs have revolutionized how online content is delivered, ensuring sites load quicker and downloads are faster and more reliable.

If you run a small to medium-sized site (around 40,000 to 50,000 page views), MaxCDN, CloudFlare and Rackspace are both solid options for your needs.

Services such as Amazon CloudFront are better suited to enterprise level sites and are overkill for sites with minimal traffic.

For small sites, Photon and jsDelivr, along with CloudFlare, are great options since each of these services are free.

Sites offering streaming media, such as video, audio and gaming, should check out CDN77 and it’s tailored service for this kind of media.

Do you use a CDN? Tell us about your CDN experiences in the comments below.

Thank you for including WPPronto (formerly WPCDN)! Although we don’t offer a free trial, we do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. And, with coupon code WPMUDEV, your readers can save 50% on the first month of WordPress hosting (through September 2014).

What do you guys think of StudioPress Accelerate service? They claim to support any host, and to serve entire websites (not only delivering static files and images) – providing an additional layer of enterprise level support for traffic bursts and high loads… We have a few sites on their service and it seems fast… Thanks for your CDN reviews!

Hello i love this topic since i always look for speed. Our setup is Amazon cloudfront its easy to use once you get the hang of it. Now about the multi site my setup is subdirectory for same domain w3 total cache works great with the other 4 sites that reside as a subdirectory and my cname for the work seamlessly like cdn1.yourdomain and etc… As for sub domains you just have to configure extra cname for that subdomain. What i be interested to see if it works with the domain mapping tool where you manage multiple sites in one multisite with different domain names that i have not tested yet.

Peter, unfortunately, the subdomain approach requires each site to be separately mapped to a CDN, because of the nature of CDN (since it’s hostname-based). You can use W3TC with multisite, though it needs to be activated on a per-subsite basis. No matter which CDN you choose, it’s essentially a matter of linking the mapped domain to the CDN. I wish there was an easier way. With a subdirectory multisite installation, the subdirectories and benefit from the parent’s CDN, unless external domains are mapped. Then they’d need to be set up for CDN by hostname anyway too.

Thanks for the clarification. Had a feeling this was the case, but good to know from an expert! Maybe becomes a premium feature for those sites that are justified (having traffic that makes the setup worth it).

Thanks for an interesting article!
One thing that slightly disturbed me is some of the pricing information. Saying “Plans are pay-as-you-go and start at 10 cents for your first terabyte of storage and 12 cents for your first terabyte of CDN bandwidth” while in fact those prices are per GB while total traffic is <1TB is somewhat misleading, as the total bill for this TB in the end would be exactly 1000 times the indicated price, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, the reason I comment here is another one: I keep reading everywhere about how Jetpack Photon uses a globally-distributed WordPress.com CDN. However, I have been unable to find any information about how globally-distributed is actually is. I know wordpress.com operates 3 server centers in the US, but as to the CDN – does anybody know where those servers are located, or which company or service wordpress.com is actually using?

Thank you so much for the article! It helped me a lot as I’ve been considering changing my CDN provider for a while.

I switched from Amazon CloudFront to CDN77. Hadn’t heard of them before I read your article, so I had expected a slighly worse performance (but I am not super-sensitive about every ms, so I gave it a try).

But in fact, the performance got even better with CDN77 and my CDN costs are almost 50% lower now. Also their nonstop livechat support is great. The guys might be quite new in the market, but the value for money is amazing.

So, thanks again Raelene for the article, you helped me save a lot of money :)

Thank you so much for the article. It help me a lot as I was looking to buy CDN network for my website.. Seeing the pricing and features, Cloudfare is best CDN network to be bought for my website.. Hope adding this would boost my website speed and performance.

I really think you need to add the company https://www.keycdn.com/ to the list, if not above MaxCDN themselves. They offer the cheapest rates, and all the features that are comparable to MaxCDN. Please write a review of them as I’d like to see if you find something wrong with them.

Adding on to the link James provided, use this website too when you price compare CDNshttp://cdncost.com/

Hi there. I-m testing a cdn account at Maxcdn an so far I belive that they are thieves. Why? OK … I argue: On my cPanel account I have arround 10 GB bandwidth usage per day. After 1 month of use I have in my maxcdn account these statistics: 68.86% cache hits and 31.14% non-cache hits. If you count… I had to have a decrease in bandwidth used … somewhere at 3 GB per day but it remained around 10 GB. How it is possible? My pics and my css appear in cache and most of my traffic is done by these files! My CNAME DNS entries are set correctly … otherwise they could not realize the statistics. I tested the pics load when I restart my server and the pics are loaded from their server in offline… I think that only when my server is offline I receive what I pay… the downloading from their network! But becouse my server is online 99.9 % … I pay for 0.1 % …. Now I uploaded my files on their PUSH zone… I hope that now I will receive what I paid! Although … not being able to check with accurately … from what location are downloaded the pictures / files for every visitor … I only can hope that they will not be download from a single server / data center location ( US California data center – personal1434647019.netdna-cdn.com push zone located – domaintools.com ) becouse I have a lot of visitors from UE… After I will complete the tests I will come back with a review.